Reviews: Theatre

FROST/NIXON

Donmar Warehouse

LONDON ****

David Frost's televised encounters with the disgraced former president Richard Nixon pulled in a record audience when aired in 1977. Now Peter Morgan has created a shrewd, partly speculative play about a contest in which the British talk-show host eventually extracted an apology (if only for "mistakes" rather than crimes) from the man who had discredited the presidency and left his country in trauma through his corrupt efforts to cover up the Watergate scandal.

Frost/Nixon, premiered in a sharp, witty and haunting production by Michael Grandage, might appear to be a paradoxical venture. Not only is it the first foray into the theatre by a writer noted for his excellent TV dramas (including The Deal, about the Blair-Brown relationship), but television would seem to be the ideal medium for this subject. As Nixon (portrayed in a performance of reverberating, near-tragic depth by Frank Langella) says, "television and the close- up, they create their own set of meanings". There's no actual correlation between a perspiring upper lip and guilt, but TV enforces one.

So it is frustrating that, during the early bouts, the bank of monitors above the live action give us roughly the same long-shot perspective on proceedings that we get on stage.

By contrast, in a highly effective sequence, we can scrutinise in close-up Frost's own discomfiture when grilled by his CBS rival, Mike Wallace, on Sixty Minutes, about the questionable ethics of giving Nixon a hefty fee. But the play and production are tactically saving themselves for the climactic showdown when, emboldened by damning new evidence, Frost (an eerily affable and ineffable Michael Sheen) breaks through Nixon's defences. Then you get the best of both worlds: the immediacy of theatre, and the camera moving in on Nixon's stricken, self-loathing face.

There can be no doubt of the timeliness of aplay that shows us a US president who feels that whatever he does is legal, if he deems it to be in the interest of national security. A flawed yet fascinating piece.

To 7 October (08700 606 624) A version of this review has already appeared in some editions of the paper

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